The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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Do you remember a time before the internet, and a time before television? Now answer the same question for your parents. And do it again for your children.

Carl Bass, chief executive of software design group believes the same query will one day be posed about driverless cars.

“It will definitely happen,” he says.

We are as human beings particularly bad at driving. The range of human performance at driving is enormous. If you take Formula One drivers, they are superb athletes who can do things with a car that you and I can’t imagine and if you take a distracted person texting with a kid in the back seat screaming, we are absolutely awful drivers.

We don’t really ever say it to each other but we literally kill thousands of people every year by driving. I think we will soon come to the conclusion that computers can drive cars way more safely than humans come. Fifty years from now, our kids and grandkids are going to look back and say: ‘I can’t believe they actually drove their own car’ back then’. It will become so routine.

Bass is in a excellent position to judge as Nasdaq-listed Autodesk’s computer-aided design software is used for design and engineering purposes within the architecture and construction, manufacturing industry and film and video game entertainment sectors.

Founded in 1982, the San Francisco-based group has about 9,000 employees. The company had revenues of $2.27 billion last year and has a stock market capitalization of £13 billion. About one quarter of its revenues are made in the U.S., where the company’s software was used to build the New York Freedom Tower and in the development of Tesla electric cars.

Who's Driving The Future? A driverless car from Mercedes-Benz at the Consumer Electronics Show in Shanghai (Picture: STR/AFP/Getty Images)

“Our tools are used to design cars in general and also driverless cars,” he says.

We’re students of driverless cars because many of our customers are wrestling with what it means to have an autonomous vehicle and all our customers are wrestling with the question of more autonomous, smarter machines.

Whether it’s a car, helicopter, drone, train or industrial machine, every one of these is now getting driven by computers and being done increasingly remotely without anybody standing by. So it’s becoming a much more interesting question of how you design for things for this. How do you put sensors in? How do you monitor. The most dramatic aspect to the public is the driverless car but it’s happening in many different walks of life.